I went to summer camp with designer Mi Leggett. Back then, we were both kind of hippie-ish theater kids. I think we were in a production together that involved large paper mâché puppets? But it was a long time ago.

Although there may be a push for legal rights wrapped up in the logic of visibility, to be steadfast while circumventing stable definition, as an individual and as a community, challenges the project of colonial law-making and undoes the foundational idea that there are universal scientific or moral parameters that people must follow.

New Definitions is an ongoing series of op-eds feeling through the journey of finding home in a neocolonial homeland as el 李 spends six months in Hong Kong visiting community organizations and reconnecting with family. Traversing geography, politics, and subcultures, these articles consider the specificity of the history of Hong Kong as former British Colony and now ‘Special Economic Region,’ as well as how diasporic queer experiences are transnationally impacted.

THE WORD “SODOM” IS LIKE A GHOST: a fuzzy archetype, a mysterious presence. Enshrined as it is in Western colonialist law and culture, the Christian morality tale of Sodom and Gomorrah and its shorthand, sodomy, have become metonyms for deviant (and usually queer-coded) sexualities and sexual practices.

IT IS JUNE 2018, and I am spending nearly a month at an artist residency on the Mendocino coast, a four hour drive north of my apartment in San Francisco. The title and ethos here is this will take time, and this line sits heavy and resonant with me for this nebulous stretch that often feels immeasurable.

If you were to ask me my two most reliable pleasures, I would be able to bark back a certain answer — the way that little children do, when you ask them what they want to eat, or what they dreamt last night. I would tell you that they are reading and swimming, mostly because they have the same rhythm, all disembodied and steady.